1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a toy building block that can create various types of not only planar but cubic articles by assembling unit pieces with originality and ingenuity and is suitable for fostering creativity in formative design for children while enjoying the activity.
2. Description of the Related Art
A block toy has been known in which one or a plurality of types of blocks are assembled using a recess and a projection and the like so as to create cubic articles such as a polygonal body, a container, a boat, a castle, a house, a wall face and the like.
According to this type of block toy, children can foster creativity in formative design while enjoying it but assembling of blocks can hardly create a curved face, and there is a defect that created cubic articles are limited to relatively simple ones in which mainly planes are combined.
On the other hand, as a toy building block with improved expressive capacity of cubic articles, such a toy is proposed in which pieces made of a metal plate are used, a length of one side of plural types of regular polygons is made the same, regardless of the number of sides, a projecting piece is projected at the center of each side, and a slit through which the projecting piece can be inserted is provided at a root of the projecting piece (See Japanese Patent Application JP S 56-097696 U (FIG. 1), for example).
According to this toy building block, by abutting one face of each of two pieces to each other at sides, inserting a projecting piece on the side of one of the pieces into a slit in the side of the other piece, and bending a distal-end portion of the projecting piece, the two pieces can be assembled with the sides abutted to each other, and moreover, since an angle between the faces of the two pieces can be arbitrarily changed, a curved face can be expressed by continuing the faces, and a spherical body such as a soccer ball using a plurality of types of pieces such as a regular triangle, a regular tetragon, and a regular hexagon.
However, with regard to the above-proposed toy building block, since the piece is constructed by a rigid plate, there is a problem that complicated assembling such as twisting or bending the piece so as to assemble it to another piece or the like is totally impossible, and the capacity of expression of cubic articles is still low.